The past three weeks have been much more about carrying than shooting.

We spent an entire week at a cabin in Western Maryland, devoting most of our days to either hiking or lying on the couch. The 1911 in its 5 ShotS.M.E. holster worked great under both extremes. Whether climbing over trees downed by Hurricane Sandy or sitting for hours at a time watching episodes of Dexter with the wife & dog, I never felt like I was wearing a big, heavy pistol. The same was true for the hours spent driving to and from the cabin. I’d promised to dry fire 100 reloads a day while at the cabin. I kept very close count of each rep and the total for the week was… Zero. Hey, I was on vacation. Shoot me. If you’re smart, you’ll do it while I’m reloading.

After the vacation, I got back into range time. I spent a day on the range with some good friends: Ernest Langdon (FAST Coin #04), Joe S. (FAST Coin #08), Jose G. (rgrgordo), and Rj5284(not his real name).Everyone took a turn shooting the SACS/Warren gun and there were some inquiries about getting on the list for the next production run.

Last Tuesday was the KSTG Match at the NRA Range, which was a quick and easy match. I shot a Master-class score on the Classifier (barely… lousy reloads, what a surprise!) and won the match by a fair margin … 45.59 versus 55.38 for second place. You can see my entire self-eval in my pistol-forum.comTraining Journal.

Friday was my first real serious practice session I’ve had in quite a while. By accident, I grabbed a case of CCI 3510 (standard pressure 115gr Blazer TMJ) instead of the M882CF (military pressure 124gr TMJ) I’ve been shooting. The difference was extremely noticeable. The Blazer weighs less and is going close to 150fps slower. It made for some interesting split times on F.A.S.T. runs (worst was a 0.20, best was a 0.15).

How is the gun running? It’s been almost 4,200 rounds since the last time I cleaned it. To be honest, I was surprised when I realized that myself. The gun gets a few drops of Militec each practice session but otherwise it’s been running without much TLC. Given that the gun seems to have stoppages when it’s clean, I’m almost scared to break out the solvent.

How is the shooting? Last week I put a lot of time and effort into analyzing my grip. Given the great AAR on Robert Vogel’s class by DocGKR, there was a lot of discussion on various forums about the grip Vogel teaches. It got me thinking about my own grip and motivated me to try a few different approaches. With the caveat that I’ve not yet trained with Vogel myself, the grip as I understand it and see it demonstrated doesn’t work for me because the slide on my 1911 will not lock back when empty. It fails 100% of the time. However, the part about torquing the hands inward definitely set off some lightbulbs for me. It’s similar to what Rob Leatham teaches, for example, except Leatham discusses it in terms of pectoral muscle push instead of the hand/wrist/shoulder twist that Vogel’s students talk about. Even though I’m not getting my support hand as high or far forward as Vogel seems to, the addition of that forceful side to side pressure was incredibly noticeable in terms of muzzle movement.

By the next report, the gun should be at the 25,000 round mark. I’ll take some photos of the internals and write up an in depth evaluation at that time.

It’s actually rewarding to read about the grip that Vogel teaches. I first read about rotating or torquing the hands into the gun over at Brian Enos’s forum. It’s really the the *only* way I can ensure that my support hand applies enough pressure to the frame for the friction between it and the gun to matter. My hands lack the meat that most professional shooters have and a simple clamshell squeeze with the support hand isn’t adequate for harder recoiling guns.